


The Tale of the Outsider

by disasterhawke



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Both Pre and Post Dragon Age 4, F/M, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Modern Character in Thedas, Modern Girl in Thedas, Multi, Non-Explicit Sex, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Varric Tethras, Past Tense, Present Tense, Solas Loses, Solas wins, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Varric's Novels, Written by Varric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:08:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26381635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disasterhawke/pseuds/disasterhawke
Summary: Famed Kirkwall Author Varric Tethras, known for his works 'Hard in Hightown', 'The Tale of the Champion' and many more, returns this year with a sequel to his latest work, 'All This Shit is Weird'. The true story of Inquisitor Edie Lavellan: The Tale of the Outsider. Read the story of the otherworldy woman behind the Inquisitor, and discover how an immortal witch's visit to another world changed her life - and restored reality as we know it.Critics have called this tale of worlds beyond the Fade "frankly unbelievable", "utter tosh", "the only story about the Inquisition that's ever made sense", and "the greatest love story ever told". Reader, we implore you to join us for a tale that is certain to shock you to your core.
Relationships: Background Varric Tethras/Female Hawke, Background Varric Tethras/Female Hawke/Isabela, Female Inquisitor/Solas (Dragon Age), Female Lavellan/Solas, Fen'Harel | Solas/Female Lavellan, Fen'Harel | Solas/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 55





	The Tale of the Outsider

**Author's Note:**

> I've always wanted to write one of Varric's books. I did not expect it to come out like this.
> 
> A few clarifications on some of the warnings & tags: character deaths are all canon, though mostly in a way you may not expect. I've flagged it for implied suicide as technically, characters do die by suicide in this story - but they do so knowing that they are in fact immortal, so do not truly die.

If you’d asked me whether I understood how the world worked, a few years ago I might’ve said yes. Then I met Edie. Of course, this story doesn’t really begin with the day I met her. To really tell you what happened, I’ll have to go a lot further back. Or, depending how you look at it, a lot further forward.

You see, Edie isn’t from our world. Turns out the Fade’s even more fucked up than any of us realised. There’s whole other worlds out there, beyond the Fade, through pathways that no mortal being can walk. Except one day that pathway got opened. You might think that’s a bad thing, but you’d be wrong. That open door’s the only reason any of us are still alive.

Now our story begins on a pretty normal day in what would, by the people living there, be considered a pretty normal place. But to us Theodosians, there’s not a normal thing about it. In this world beyond the Fade, our world is just a story. There are cities larger than all the capitals of all the kingdoms combined. People drive carts through those cities, powered by explosions contained in metal boxes. They talk to each other from opposite sides of that world through waves unseen in the air, and share all the world's information in a library that you can't step into.

But by their reckoning, and by Edie’s, her flat in the suburbs was a pretty normal place. It was the sort of place that looked like it would be nice inside, if it weren’t subject to such a disorderly tenant. Papers were strewn over every surface: half-finished job applications, demands for late payments, and a stack of books that had never quite managed to be read. They even made their way into the kitchen amidst pans growing a light layer of mold.

The woman who lived there was pretty normal herself. I’ve known a few heroes in my time - larger than life people who would draw all the attention in the room. Edie wasn’t like that, but then she also wasn’t the sort of person you’d always overlook. She was just a person, with long, light hair that couldn’t quite make up its mind between brown and blonde. Her eyes were dark, and her skin was fair, with a face that had a little too much nose and not quite enough sharpness to its shape. She had freckles that were lopsided, too few on one cheek and too many on the other.

On the day our story begins, Edie was sat at her dining table, looking at a guest that couldn’t possibly be there, trying to work out what to say.

You see, there wasn’t anything about that guest that made sense. The options were that either she was dreaming, or that she’d just lost it completely. But she figured - well, either I’m safe in bed, and there isn’t a fictional witch in my dining room, and I’ve got nothing to worry about. Or I’ve snapped and there are bigger things for me to worry about.

Still it was hard for her to believe either of those options, because she could smell the woman in front of her. It was perfume - Edie couldn’t make it out but it was floral, heady, like the sort that tries to push you away and pull you in all at once, and lingers for hours after the source has gone.

Either the witch was inconsequential, or not real, or too real. So Edie did the only thing you can do. She answered her with the first thing that came into her head.

“But the fourth game isn’t even out yet.”

“Not for you,” the witch said, walking around the table in hard-soled boots. They clicked on the wooden floor like a war drum’s beat. "For Thedas, my wolf's victory is already a grim reality."

Flemeth was not as tall as Edie had imagined, but that didn’t stop her from taking over the flat with a low whisper. Though Edie had always hated making eye contact with people, Flemeth was the kind to give you no choice. Edie caught a glimpse of her reflection in the balcony door - a deer, caught in the torchlight.

“Why me?” she asked.

Flemeth smiled, and rested a gauntleted hand on a stack of books. Edie found herself wishing desperately that she’d tidied like she’d meant to. "Because," Flemeth said simply, "you are the best for the job."

Edie laughed, and the witch leant forward in a challenge.

"You know the world I would have you save. You know its possibilities, its trials, its depths. And," she added, looking at the mess of job applications on the table, and the flat that was empty save for the two of them, "you have nothing to lose. Nothing to leave behind."

Edie wasn’t laughing anymore - but it was true, what the witch was saying. An only child born to only children, Edie had lost both her parents over a decade ago. Those carts I mentioned - well, they can be as dangerous as they are useful. And with her job gone, stuck in a town she’d only moved to for an ex who hadn’t been worth the trouble, Edie was as lost as lost can be.

Flemeth had picked her target well.

"The Veil has been torn down, child. The world you lived the story of is gone. And what has it gotten him? Nothing. The People remain cursed with the same arrogance that doomed them in the first place. Fen'Harel has not succeeded because it is impossible for him to succeed. But in his failure, he has opened the doors to all of the other worlds. He has granted me the power to fix his mistakes."

By now Flemeth had walked the entire way round the table, to come and face our heroine. Her armour gleamed in the artificial light. From the kitchen, the oven started beeping; Edie’s dinner was ready.  _ Another goddamn frittata _ . She didn’t want to eat it. She didn’t want to eat her frozen vegetables and cheap eggs, and she didn’t want to write another job application where she’d be told again that she was overqualified.

And Flemeth knew it.

"If the world is already destroyed," Edie said carefully, "there's no risk. Changing things is the point. I don't have to worry about using what I know. About doing things wrong."

"Get it wrong," Flemeth said, in a triumphant purr, "and I will simply put you back into the world, unharmed."

"Like a checkpoint."

"Precisely."

Edie took a deep breath. "I have some conditions," she said.

The witch smiled at her. And that’s where our story really begins.

\---

Of course, nothing’s ever simple.

On the first day that Edie woke up in a cell in Haven, with my favourite Seeker yelling in her face, she recited lines from the story of the Inquisition the entire way up the hill to where I met her. Where she promptly stabbed the apostate Solas with a knife she’d gotten from a dead soldier.

In her defence, and to her astonishment, it did work. He’d come close enough to look at her mark - which hurt like a motherfucker - and she’d just brought the knife up and along his throat. It took more pressure than she’d expected, and covered her face in so much blood it made her gag...but this was quickly replaced by another problem. The crossbow bolt that buried itself in the back of her neck.

Varric, I hear you say. That’s no way to treat the heroine of your story. Well, in  _ my  _ defence, I’d never met the woman before and she killed someone who’d been keeping demons off my ass for the past five hours. Besides, if I hadn’t done it, you can bet Cassandra would’ve been there a second afterwards. I don’t remember any of this, of course, but Edie grins too much when she tells the story for it to be a lie.

Edie came to on cold, hard stone, her hands shackled again and the mark splitting veilfire.

“Oh, child,” murmured an amused voice in her ear. “If it were that easy, do you think I would need you?”

The second time, she tried telling Cassandra and Leliana absolutely everything. Even I could’ve told her that’s a fucking stupid idea, but I wasn’t there, and let’s face it, you’ve already seen me kill her once. Well, suffice it to say that the two of them decided Edie was insane and dragged her, bodily, up to the rift on the mountainside. When she lifted her hand to open it, everything went green - then white - then back to cold, stone cell.

On attempts three to nine, I’ve been sworn to secrecy.

_ So _ , Edie thought to herself as she turned her wrists in the chains.  _ Tenth time lucky. Let’s try something totally different. _

“Tell me why we shouldn’t just kill you now,” the Seeker said, storming towards her. “The Conclave is destroyed. Everyone who attended is dead. Except you.”

Lifting her head, Edie set her lips into a grim line. “Because,” she said, her voice coming out hoarse, “I’m the only person who knows what happened to Divine Justinia.”

Anyone who’s ever met the Left and Right Hands of the Divine knows neither of them is the kind of woman to show weakness. Not to people they don’t know, anyway. But when Edie said that, they both gasped. The second of them stumbled forward in shock, kneeling down and staring into Edie’s eyes.

“Solas said you may not remember,” the Nightingale said, her Orlesian voice breathy with hope.

Coughing, because her throat really was dry, Edie shook her head. “I remember. I remember all of it. Oh, Maker - it was horrible.”

You might think our heroine’s just being a good actress here - but no, much like the reams of stories she’d read in her world, she was finding that telling people the story she knew was a lot harder when they were real and in front of her. As soon as she started talking, Edie realised that she was going to have to tell them that Justinia really was dead. That she’d been killed by a monster that looked like a darkspawn but spoke like any sentient being.

This time, she didn’t tell them the whole story - just what anyone in her position could’ve known, if they’d remembered. The Seeker and the Nightingale lapped it up in desperation, then realisation, then horror.

“Cassandra,” Leliana said, standing and turning to face her friend. “We must get her up the mountain.”

“I agree. Come. I will show you what has happened since you collapsed.” Reaching down and undoing the chains on Edie’s hands, Cassandra helped her to her feet. “What is your name?”

Of course, Edie had already worked out that ‘Edith Walker’ didn’t sound like a name from Thedas - especially not with the body she’d asked the witch to give her. She rubbed at her sore wrists, pushed loose scraps of dark hair out of her pale eyes, and - for the first time - told the women in front of her the name she’d decided on.

“Lavellan,” she said. “Edie Lavellan.”

\---

Now I don’t know why Flemeth sent Edie in with little more than an ‘if you please, messaire’, but she must’ve known it was going to have consequences. It wasn’t like telling someone to change a single moment. It wasn’t as simple as facing down Corypheus and saying okay, this is how we beat him. And honestly? I’m pretty sure that wasn’t Flemeth being an ass. The world just doesn’t work like that. It’s cause and effect, sure, but people? People are unpredictable.

Trust me. I watched Hawke stab her best friend between the ribs.

Attempt number ten went pretty well, the way Evie tells it. She survived long enough to make it to Haven. To travel the Hinterlands, and the Storm Coast, and bring us refugees and mercenaries and - eventually - what remained of the Templar Order. She plays it off as just making sure she got the kid before he could get too far into her head, but I’m pretty sure she was trying to get one back at Chuckles even then.

He broke her before he ever knew her, you see. Sometimes, when she thinks people aren’t looking, and especially when Baldie’s pissed her off, she starts humming a tune under her breath. Four intervals, all descending, slow and soft and broken - except it sounds like it should be fast, like it should be thundering with the sort of heartbeat you have when dragonfire is licking at your heels (and you can trust me on that one, too).

I asked her, when she told me everything, what it was from. She said it was the sound that creeps into the cracks in your heart. The sound that the world makes as you run towards the thing you know will break you.

She was humming it when the tenth attempt ended, when she played too large a hand too early, confronting Corypheus with all of her knowledge, all of her understanding, every single thing she knew about him. In the end, in the real timeline, the one we all lived through, Corypheus looked at her like she was nothing and cast her aside.

In this attempt - well, let’s say he took her seriously. Seriously enough to call his dragon back to eat her whole. And this early on, she wasn’t fast enough with her magic to stop him.

The way she tells it...things went bad, after that. Went a bit off the rails, she might say. And I mean, who can blame the woman. She’d just spent six months fighting through storms and snow and dragons and a war between people with powers that didn’t exist in her world. And she’d failed. Not the sort of failure you feel when a job goes awry, or you can’t convince the merchant to take the price down far enough to feed your family. The sort where you're watching a whole fucking building explode but all you can hear is the person you love most whispering  _ no, no, no, you didn't. _

On the eleventh try, she curled up in the prison in Haven and just sobbed, mumbling things that made no sense, about a world no one around her understood. She broke so hard even the Nightingale thought she was nothing more than a madwoman, broken by the destruction of the Conclave itself. I guess, in a way, she was.

There were seventeen more attempts after that, none of which made it far. They didn’t end in monumental ways. Edie tried. She really tried. She kept the tactic of making herself invaluable, using her knowledge, but not too much. She managed to make friends and start to build the Inquisition we know. But she was just too darn tired. Too tired of smiling at a man she knew was going to break the world. Too tired of being alone in a people who looked to her, but didn’t understand her.

Eventually, she started just going through the motions. And that’s when things change. She gets far enough to make it to Therinfal Redoubt, you see. Something she hasn’t done since that tenth try, when things had started to go right.

And as she steps into her own mind, resigning herself to another adventure through a demon’s sick attempt to control her, Edie hears a voice.

“Oh! It’s you. I thought I had dreamt you, which would be strange, because I don’t dream. How do you dream when you’re already made of them? Is the realness the dream, or is the dream real?”

\---

See, the Fade works in weird and mysterious ways, and spirits are made of that shit. Edie stumbles through the rest of the trials at Therinfal Redoubt in a haze, listening to Cole prattling excitedly at her, not realising that her steps are coming a little faster, her spells a little stronger, her voice a little louder because finally, finally she wasn’t alone.

When the kid reappears after that, in Haven, she knocks every figure on the war table over as she throws her arms around his shoulders. Needless to say, that confuses most of the people in the room, and riles up the others. But they trust her enough to let it slide, even then.

That night, Cole steps through the wall into her hut and kneels with her by the fire, curled up under the blankets as she tells him every moment of the story she would later tell me - that I am now telling you. Of course, he'd known almost all of it already.

Edie didn’t succeed that time. She died to nothing more than bad luck; to failing to launch the trebuchet that should have brought a landslide down on Corypheus, and getting herself cremated against the weapon’s base instead. Her fingers, cold from the mountain’s fierce winter, had been too stiff to hold it. After that, she never went anywhere without gloves, fingerless so that she could still cast her spells without issue - the spells that, as time went on, she got better and better at.

In the next attempts, she went to Therinfal Redoubt the very moment the Order would grant her an audience, getting Cole on her side as early as she could - giving them more and more time to try to work out what she needed to do.

\--

A few times after that, Edie made it to Skyhold. And if she'd thought that things had changed a lot when Cole found her the second time, well...this one really took the Divine's wimple. She remembers this one pretty well, so I'll let them show you.

Solas's rotunda is bigger than she expects. Large enough that they've been here a month and he's barely filled a quarter of the walls with his artwork. She's coming down from dropping off a bag of things she'd rather not think about with the researchers, rubbing her gloved hands together to try and scrape the residue from the leather.

"I trust your trip to Crestwood was profitable, Inquisitor."

The mage is up on the scaffold, back to her, hand raised with a paintbrush considering the next stroke. He waits, and waits, and waits, and makes the line in one, decisive swoop. Edie watches as she takes the last few steps, coming to stop before his desk.

"It was wet," Edie says drily, wriggling her still uncomfortable toes in finally dry socks. "But we've closed the rift that was there."

"How fortuitous that you chose to visit."

Her hands stop moving, one thumb pressing anxiously into another palm. Solas still doesn't look at her. "Sealing rifts is vital to restoring order to Thedas," she says, stiffly.

Another brush stroke. It's becoming an ear. A lupine one. "Certainly. And yet," he continues, tilting his head just enough to expose the profile of his face, "with no other reason to travel there at this juncture, an inefficient use of resources."

Edie resists the urge to swear; I haven't told her about Hawke's letter yet. "Honestly," she says, with a deep sigh, "I just wanted to see somewhere other than the bloody Hinterlands for once."

Solas makes no reply, so Edie uses it as a cue to escape, moving round the table and out towards the main hall, towards the tavern, towards the only person who truly understands her.

And as she passes through the door, she hears Solas whisper, "You'll have to do better than that, harellan."

The way Edie tells it, she knew what the word meant even then, even before she snuck into the library through the balcony and found it in a dictionary. Trickster, he had named her - and loud enough, she was sure, for her to hear.

She just didn't know whether it was a compliment or a threat.

It would've been easier to live with if she'd just had the fear. If she'd just had the gnawing horror of not knowing how much he'd worked out. Except she didn't. She had the rest of us.

See, Edie had collected us a dozen times when we were just pictures that talked back - two dozen more now we were people who had bodies and smells and the normal, mundane sides you don't get in a story. She'd loved us before we were whole, and now we were there, loud and omnipresent and desperate to help her...well, she was truly fucked.

She says the first time I took her up onto the battlements, to meet Hawke, she felt like she was going to vomit. That she was suddenly, painfully aware that she was about to meet a woman who was both her and not her, and unpredictable in a way that none of the rest of us had been, because she knew just how many things Hawke could have been.

We stepped onto the stones and Hawke turned, dark lips grinning on a sunburned face, and gave her a mock salute.

"So," she said, tapping a dagger. "You're shorter than I expected. You know, for the holy prophet of a religion that should consider you rather more  _ un_holy." 

Edie grinned back.

Fifty three days later she died trying to get both Hawke and Alistair out of the Fade; she'd refused to leave either of them behind.

\---

For the first hour, the hour she’d done so many times now that it spanned more than a day, Edie sat in her restraints in a cold, dingy cell, waiting groggily for the moment that Cassandra and Leliana would storm into the room and lead her onto another attempt.

This, she says, was one of the times that she cried.

She hadn’t done it often. Cole had made her, now and then, but most of the time it had just bubbled up inside her waiting for the moment to break out. She used up a whole attempt crying, in fact; she was so distraught that Cassandra and Leliana left her there, deeming her a useless wreck to be returned to as a scapegoat, too broken to be worth even their determination.

Edie swears that when she woke up the next time, in the same restraints, it felt for a moment like a metal-clawed hand was gripping her shoulder. Then, just like all the hope she’d carried until the moment Solas called her harellan, it vanished.

That time, she took it out on him.

Not by disagreeing with him, or ignoring him. No, this time she took him with her everywhere, trawled through the Hinterlands, even took the mages as he’d wanted to. She walked through hell with Dorian just to try and work out what made Solas tick, and then she jabbed at those ticks with razor-sharp barbs.

Most of the time he was cool, and collected, the way he always was. But sometimes - sometimes, she made him truly angry, and those were the times that made her chest light up with righteous fire.

Now any Dalish who knows their salt will tell you - or would tell you, knowing who and what Solas really was - that Edie was playing a dangerous game. But she’d realised something, the moment he’d deemed her on the same level as him - as a trickster. Playing the dangerous game was the very thing Flemeth had sent her to do.

Finding out how much he knew about her was part of that - and to do that, she had to learn him. Learn every small, miniscule crack in his demeanour that showed a little of what lay underneath. In the end, that try, she got distracted and had to start over. The second time through she didn’t challenge him at all - she was meek, and curious, the perfect First learning from their hahren.

Something about it felt wrong, so wrong that she willingly stepped into a Templar’s line of sight halfway through the Hinterlands, sending her right back to cold stone and cold manacles again.

\---

Now I’m going to pause just a moment here, because the thing with stories is that it’s easy to get so swept up with them that you forget what’s real.

Here’s the thing you need to remember: at this point, Edie Lavellan has spent years,  _ years  _ working on this. Most of the times she’s gone through she’s managed months of work before Flemeth has pulled her out. She knows the Hinterlands so well you’d think she’s a native, knows all the tactics of every Templar, red or otherwise, and can pretty much recite you every speech given by Chancellor ‘I Would’ve Been Meredith Stannard’s Greatest Fanboy’ Roderick.

That shit costs you. Changes you. Edie came into Thedas as a woman who’d never touched magic, and by this point there are few mages who’ll give her a run for her money in wielding it. Because this isn’t the talking pictures, the game she knew this world through. Edie Lavellan is learning, and training, and getting better and better with every time through.

It’s breaking her, and she’s doing it anyway. She lets it break her.

So. One more test, she says. One more opportunity to poke the wolf, and then she’ll go back to real attempts, serious attempts, ones she intends to succeed at rather than tests she’s running. Edie storms through the next Haven as a quiet, hard woman who she doesn’t quite realise she’s become. She challenges the people around her as fiercely as she stands up for them.

It goes on for a year. A year where she liberates the Hinterlands, travels in time to save the Mage rebellion, terrifies everyone who meets her with her cold, calm composure and the ability to pull the Veil from the very essence of a person and kill them with it. Solas, she doesn’t ignore, but doesn’t keep close either - she makes it clear where they agree, and stands firm where they do not, until wherever she goes his eyes are watching her, hard and dark.

In Halamshiral, she exposes Florianne to a court who love her despite her vallaslin, outplays them all with a triple dose of blackmail, and brings the uncomfortable trio of Empress, General and elven revolutionary to heel under the Inquisition’s banner.

When she steps out onto the balcony, watching the stars twinkle in constellations that it took her years to recognise, Edie hears the soft pad of footfalls coming up behind her and laughs.

“Does my presence amuse you, Inquisitor?” Solas asks, raising a brow as she turns to look at him. “Or were you perhaps expecting someone else.”

Edie steps forward once, twice, plucks her everite staff from its spot against the balustrade and pauses just before him - offset, as if moving to pass him by. Her eyes drift first to the party, continuing with aplomb beyond the thick curtains, then dart to his.

“Why not both?” she remarks lightly, then steps forward.

The moment she comes level with him his hand flies out, gripping her upper arm so tightly she can feel the shape of his fingers through the thick velvet of her uniform - rich, dark green, a colour she’d convinced Josephine would make her vallaslin (and her delightfully unexpected, unmasked Dalishness) stand out all the more.

Solas lowers his voice to a soft, purring whisper. “You are playing a dangerous game, Inquisitor.”

“Really,” Edie replies, flicking her hair back over her shoulder as she tilts her head. “If you’re only just noticing that now, then you’re not keeping up as well as I thought - vhenan.”

Before he can do more than stare in disbelief, Edie presses her body in, lips catching against his as one hand furls itself around his too-sharp jaw, his body becoming real in a way it never has in the years of having his hand pressed against her wounds, pulling her up when she’s fallen, shaking her own in the moments she’s made him believe she agrees.

There is a moment - just a moment - where he tenses his grip and pulls her in, his other hand splaying below the hem of her tunic, something dark and incomprehensible growling from his throat to her lips -

And then she is gone.

The next day, before it’s time to leave Halamshiral, Edie jumps from the balcony, a wild grin shining in her eyes.

\---

If you ask me, the reason she got it right, in the end, is that she stopped trying to do anything but exactly what she wanted.

The time after she kisses Solas so fiercely that every step she takes through the ballroom grates against her most desperate, needy places, Edie wakes up in the Haven prison and decides that it’s time. This is it. This is going to be the last time through.

She isn’t quite there, as it happens, but we’re getting close. In fact, this is the second to last time that she’ll ever try, because - as you already know by now - she gets there in the end. Well. The world hasn’t ended yet, at least. Who knows - there’s always tomorrow. But I’m digressing.

This time, when she ascends the mountain to be greeted by a rogue with fantastic chest hair and a placid but mysterious apostate, the apostate is neither placid nor mysterious. From the moment she steps into the fight, Edie feels Solas watching her. He barely does anything in the fight - even gets himself into trouble with a shade, until Cassandra charges it in exasperation. Don’t ask me how the woman does it, I’ve no idea. Sometimes when the Seeker saves you you can practically hear her calling you an idiot with every step.

“It seems introductions are in order,” Solas says with false warmth a few moments later, eyes still trained upon her.

Edie smiles, her own feigning an expression of innocence. “Are they?”

His response is low, and thin. “I suppose not.”

“Since he has been keeping that mark from killing you whilst you slept,” I point out helpfully - at least I assume I was trying to be helpful. Naturally I don’t remember a moment of it, but I know sexual tension when I see it. Anyone who’s ever met Broody can spot the signs from a dozen paces.

But they don’t talk about it then, they don’t talk about it in Haven, they don’t talk about it until Solas has spent months upon months watching her. Edie is convinced he’s waiting to see what move she’ll make; she’s waiting to see how long he’ll keep watching. And they keep going. Through Redcliffe. Through Halamshiral. Through Adamant. Him always there, at her side, dark eyes locked on her small, robed frame.

One of her conditions to Flemeth: make me short, for an elf, but make me a little too plump. Enough that you’ll never be quite certain what to make of me. Make me unearthly, but not beautiful. Striking, but not pretty. Make me unforgettable, and unnoticeable, all at once.

Give me her vallaslin, and make them as dark as a green dragon’s blood.

Flemeth had smiled at that, Edie says. She chalks it up to them sharing the same sense of humour. I think that’s the moment the witch realised she’d picked the right person to fix the world.

She’s there, in a sense, when Edie undoes the years of work spent on this single attempt. It’s the longest she’s been in any one timeline. The furthest she’s gotten. They’re at the entrance to the Temple of Mythal, and Edie can practically feel the magic in her bones, the magic Flemeth gave her, singing for the spark of a Goddess lost and found.

The witch Morrigan stands at her side, mistranslates part of a plinth before them. Edie watches Solas. Solas watches her back. It’s a risk. By showing him this, she might give up everything. He remembers  _something,_ he has to, he’s too suspicious. She’s too much like him, and he knows it. 

“Are you certain?” Edie asks lightly, curiously, peering at the engraving and the parts eaten away by centuries of decay. “Go through it with me again.”

She lets Solas watch as she pokes holes in Morrigan’s lies even as she agrees with her philosophy, just as she’s done to him in all the times she’s tested his resolve to break the world. This is the moment she realises what she’s going to do; how she’s going to change the timeline once and for all. She’s impatient for the first time in a long, long time.

It’s her second decade in Thedas.

Her second decade of trying.

Morrigan is antsy by the time they make it through the rituals, her barbed comments coming a mile a minute, silencing only when they step into the hall and the sentinels level a dozen arrows at them.

Smiling, Edie steps forward and bows to Abelas, their leader. She lets Morrigan fly off, and appeases the sentinels, following their guide through to the beyond. She tears Calpernia’s beliefs apart and then kills her for it. And she steps up onto the dais that contains the vir’abelasan and  _ listens. _

She doesn’t have to touch the water. She hears it the moment she can see it, the voices of all of Mythal’s chosen. Later, Edie told me that this was the moment she started to believe. She’d been acting Dalish for two decades and she’d never truly felt it - that sense of power, of legacy.

A chorus of voices whispers: “You are here, lethallan, you are here,” and Edie feels something click into place. She smiles - and Solas notices. He pauses midway through arguing with Morrigan, who is now declaring herself the only person ready to carry this burden.

Edie turns her back to him, steps away, around, as if processing the argument continuing now between Morrigan and the sentinel. And quietly, so softly that she can barely hear the sound in her own hypersensitive ears, Edie whispers, “I need the words of passage. I need the safety of Pride’s sanctuary.”

\---

I know, I know. Varric, you’re thinking, this has all got a bit weird. You’re talking about this like it’s the most monumental thing that’s happened yet, and that’s saying something, given that our hero’s been plucked out of her own world and put into one she didn’t know had flesh and blood. But trust me on this. This is the moment she really gets it - the last weapon she needs to take him down.

The words that she couldn’t remember, but knew would make him trust her and suspect her all in one go.

See, a very long time ago, and I mean that in our sense, our real sense, Solas kept people safe. Fought for it. Gave everything for it. There’s a part of him, Edie figured, that was still trying to do that. And yeah - maybe she had to get as weird as he is to work it out. Maybe it really did take this many years of pushing his tumblers to work out the right combination. Maybe she’d never had any choice.

Morrigan bathes in the Well of Sorrows, and a week later Edie follows her through an open Eluvian to find her son, the child Edie is pretty sure is Alistair’s even though he never admitted it before he died. They walk down steps that steam with mist and Morrigan runs, runs, runs until she stops at the face of her own mother.

“You!” Morrigan cries, and Edie smiles.

“Hello, Mythal,” she says stepping past a Morrigan who is now twice as confused as she is angry. “I think I’ve got it, next time.”

Behind her, Morrigan begins to splutter in incoherent protest - Flemeth raises a hand and snaps it shut like a crocodile’s mouth, forcing her quiet. Then, hands rested on her grandson’s shoulders, she looks at Edie and smiles.

“I do believe that you have,” Flemeth says, and tilts her head. “I suppose you will be wanting the last condition, now.”

Edie nods, and steps forward, tucking her hair behind her ears. “Out of curiosity,” she says, as she presents herself, “how much  _ does  _ he remember?”

The smile that turns Flemeth’s lips as she brushes her hand over Edie’s face is almost predatory. “Oh, child. I could not have done better in picking you if I had made you myself. Our wolf dreams of you. You haunt his steps in the place that should be his sanctuary. You have become such a terror to him.”

She barely feels the touch of Flemeth’s magic; just enough to know, when the woman removes her gauntleted hand, that it is done. It is not freedom, because she has never been chained - it was one of the conditions. Say the word, swear to Mythal that she would try not one more time, and Flemeth would have lifted her from the duty she’d given Edie when she had nothing else to fight for.

“One last thing,” says Flemeth, returning her hand to her grandson’s shoulder, “before you go.”

Edie tilts her head.

“There is a condition that you did not ask of me.”

“There are plenty of things I didn’t ask for, like a pink pony with a rainbow tail. But I’m guessing you mean something in particular.”

Flemeth smirks icily. “You did not ask to be returned to your world, when this is over. Or even to another. There are many more, you know.”

At this point Edie can feel the magic beginning to take hold, beginning to pull her away, ready to take her to what she swears will be the last time. “I never fought as hard for that life,” she says, with a shrug. “I reckon I’ve given it a pretty good go, this time round.”

The last thing that Edie hears before everything goes black is: “Naturally. It is, after all, why I chose you.”

\---

Now we’re finally reaching the story you already know. At least - you know the big sweeps of it. You know that a woman named Edie Lavellan stepped out of the wreckage of the Conclave, the only survivor, a green mark on her hand. You know that she joined the fledgling Inquisition, an organisation commissioned by Divine Justinia before her death, and began to bring people into it from far and wide.

You know that she travelled all of Ferelden, all of Orlais, closing rifts and putting the world to rights. That she took the rebel mages of Redcliffe at her side and saved the Grey Wardens at Adamant, even though it was at the cost of a good man’s life. You know that she saved Empress Celene from an assassination and set up a council between the Empress, Duke Gaspard, and Ambassador Briala that seemed at once an unsteady and unshakeable truce. You know that she went into the Deep Roads, that she travelled to the Frostbacks, to far and deep reaches of the deserts.

You know that she rode a witch-turned-dragon into the broken remains of Haven and tore a Magister asunder.

But you’re not listening to the official story. They hired someone with much less style to write that one. You’re listening to one of the people who knew her most. The person she sat down and told everything, the day before that fight in the sky. The person she trusted to write it, if it all went wrong, and Flemeth had made this her last try in more ways than one.

Here are the moments that you do not know about.

\---

The first time Solas laid eyes on Edie Lavellan, he knew something was strange. Because he was certain Cassandra had told him the woman was Dalish - but her skin was devoid of any markings save for the freckles that dotted her face. Too many on one side, and too few on the other.

But if there was one thing Edie Lavellan was good at, and one thing Fen’Harel was good at, it was waiting. Waiting and watching. They were close from the start; she took him on every mission, even when it made little sense. You only had to look at them to know that there was something there, that something was happening under your nose that you couldn’t quite make out.

This time, when she brought Orlais under her heel at Halamshiral, Edie was waiting for Solas when he stepped out onto the balcony.

“Dance with me, vhenan?” she asked, one hand extended out, the other leant on the railing.

Solas’s mouth quirked. “Is that not what we have been doing already, Inquisitor?”

He took her hand and pulled her in, tighter than was necessary, a threat and a claiming all in one. Edie let him lead her, drawing her in slow, languid circles, then sudden sweeping steps as the music changed, all the time humming a strange, descending counterpoint to the string quartet.

When the song ended, they stepped apart, hands dragging across one another as if only belatedly stepping away.

“You are Dalish,” he said, as she turned to depart, “but have no vallaslin. Why?”

For a moment Edie continued to walk, causing him to turn after her, tilting his body round to follow the passage of her own. Then she stopped. Leaned back. Brought her mouth to whisper in his ear the words that she had never allowed herself to forget, since the moment the vir’abelasan whispered them.

“Ar-melana dirthavaren. Revas vir-anaris.”

The only regret she had, Edie told me later, was that she didn’t look back to see his expression.

\---

If she’d tried it earlier, of course, he would’ve throttled her then and there. But Edie Lavellan had haunted Fen’Harel’s dreams for too long to allow him to cast her aside just because she’d laid another puzzle before him. And once she had started, she didn’t stop. It was just a comment, here and there.

Edie rescued a spirit that he loved and incinerated the people who’d taken it, all with him watching her with a steady, dipped, predatory gaze. She left the pelt of a wolf, neatly cut and cleaned and dried, over the back of his chair whilst he was out walking with Cole. One time he got into a shouting match with Sera in the middle of the Emerald Graves, as they stood in Din’an Hanin, a place that Sera declared to be ‘more whiny elfy elf shit’.

In about thirty seconds - Edie maintains it was more, but the Iron Bull (who was watching) maintains it was definitely less - the Inquisitor had disarmed Sera and dragged Solas into another room, to the statue and the carving that she’d paused to deliberately read aloud.

“I am not a child to be yanked about at your whim, vhenan,” Solas hissed, making Edie’s toes curl at the name.

“I know,” she said, sitting on the edge of the statue, legs dangling, her head now the same level as his. “There is a line in this - did you read it? I thought it was interesting.”

Incensed, and in no mood for a new game, Solas stepped between her legs and planted one hand behind her, on the cold surface of the statue, his nose almost brushing against hers. Edie looked up, eyes gleaming in the light of the veilfire nearby.

“We trusted in dreams,” she whispered, her voice low, “and perceived immortality.”

“Who  _ are _ you.”

He growled the words against her lips, other hand moving to grip painfully tight around her thigh. Between kisses that tore the last vestiges of her composure apart, Edie replied in the ancient elvish of the plaque below her. “I am the promise of hope.”

\---

The game, after that, became two-sided. They had torn something in one another open, the beginning of the end of the end, and now even as they tumbled inexorably towards Corypheus’s destruction - and what Edie knew to be her last chance to change his mind, before his plans went too far and the Qunari changed everything - they couldn’t stop pushing the lines.

Can’t say I blame them. You live in a world of chaos for too long, you start to wonder - what’s the point in keeping to those lines, anyhow? Why bow to the rules of a world that doesn’t care a jot to uphold them itself. Of course, next thing you know you’ve lost a game of Wicked Grace because everyone involved is cheating, and suddenly the pirate across from you has one hand down your best friend’s pants and is using the other to push her head towards your lap and the last coherent thing you think to yourself is  _ Andraste’s tits, Bianca’s gonna have me killed for this. Again. _

Yeah, maybe that one’s a bit too specific.

But surprisingly relevant, given that the weeks leading up to Edie’s second journey to the Temple of Mythal are spent finding shadowed corners of Skyhold, corners she’s learned from watching Bull duck into them, corners she knows Solas will walk past.

Corners from which she can murmur low, reckless things. Things like: “Do you ever wonder if there are worlds beyond ours, beyond the Fade?” and “It is the slow arrow that the beast never notices.”

Every time, Solas whirls on his heel, presses her against the wall and tears at the skirts of her robe, calling her a dozen names she understands and a dozen more she can’t translate as he takes her. 

Edie says she did this because he had to be mad enough to trust her.

But as something of an expert in relationships you’re in over with your head with before they even start - I’m pretty sure it was never just that.

\---

The true end of the end, the moment everything changed, was the moment she took a paintbrush to his mural. The day before we defeated Corypheus. The day she told me everything.

Deadline day.

It had taken all of the twenty seven years she’d been Inquisitor - and not Inquisitor, and almost Inquisitor - to manage it. Finding and scraping and cobbling together enough of the ancient elvish language, the one that no one could truly speak but Solas, had not been easy. She’d had to get the last of it from Morrigan in the end, by getting her into an intense debate about the translation of a book - but she’d managed it.

Cole pulled Solas away so that she could do it, just as he’d done before. It didn’t take long. She’d memorised the phrase and repeated it over and over in her mind since she’d finished it.

The looping script was a beautiful, elegant expression of ancient elvhen. In the common tongue, it read:

_ The wolf that does not flee the battlefield will finally see the truth of hope’s promise. _

When she left the rotunda, fingertips still stained with the deep green paint, Edie took me up to her quarters and told me this story. All of it. Every single sodding detail, and by Bartrand’s scraggly beard I swear I thought she was making it up. She’d had the sense to bring a bottle of whiskey with her, and the sense to not try and stop me from drinking it all myself. She had notes, too. She’d written the entire thing down the night before. It was locked in her desk; she gave me the only key.

“This is it, Varric,” she said, looking every inch of the dozens of lifetimes she’d lived. “I’ve done it.”

I stared at her. “Not to down your spirits, Inquisitor,” I said, sitting back in my chair, “but aren’t you putting the cart before the horse a bit there? I mean, you just told me that in your world, Solas starts all of that shit  _ years  _ from now.”

Edie just smiled. She reached out, and patted my hand. “Varric,” she said, “stories don’t begin the moment you start telling them, and they don’t end the moment you stop.”

It was the last thing she ever said about it.

\---

Here’s the thing: I don’t know how the story ends.

Here’s what I do know.

I know that every single person the Inquisitor had recruited to follow her rode those broken stones up to the sky. I know that in that final battle, we fought and fought - and almost died more than a few times - but that by the end of it, she’d raised a hand and done something to make him explode into a thousand pieces, and then nothing.

I know that everyone picked themselves up from the ground and began, bloody and exhausted and shaken, to celebrate. I saw Sera riding on the Iron Bull’s shoulders, one hand on his horns and the other waving wildly. I saw Morrigan shift back into her human form, and Dorian move to help her up. I saw Cassandra clap Rainier on the shoulder and Vivienne stand tall and proud as she smiled triumphantly.

But my eyes landed on Cole: alone, daggers still clutched and dripping in his hands, smiling as he looked off into the distance.

I followed his gaze, and saw two figures silhouetted against the sky: one holding the broken remains of Corypheus’s orb, the other holding out a hand wreathed in energy. It flickered and lit up pale, guarded faces, eyes locked on one another.

Then the taller figure cast the broken orb aside, took the other’s glowing hand, and the two of them vanished into the shattered - but not shattered - lands that lay beyond.

And I know that the Inquisitor was never seen again. But I also know the world didn’t end.

So I reckon she did alright.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! <3


End file.
